


tell me just to move on

by AppleJuiceisboss



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Angst, Brief suicidal thoughts, Character Study, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Michael is hurting, Post-Squip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 04:09:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12380616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AppleJuiceisboss/pseuds/AppleJuiceisboss
Summary: player two who?





	tell me just to move on

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Gabbie Hanna's "out loud" (also good to listen to while reading if you wanna give that a go.)

Soft, furtive glances. A mess of a kiss, teeth clacking together, their giggles mixing into the noise of a loading screen in the background. One quiet testament to the questioning of Jeremy's sexuality, the words reverberating in his skull for months afterwards. 

He recalls a time when the world still felt new, like the little boy with the thick framed glasses could still do anything he put his mind to it. With his best friend at his side, of course. He remembers the time Jeremy shoved Jared Durit for a mean spirited comment about his weight, he remembers the angry grunt as the bully was suddenly on the ground via a lanky kid who weighed ninety pounds when wet. He'd hugged him then, clung to him with all he had, and later his mothers had invited Jeremy to come over for dinner, thanking him for being in their lives. 

These are things he gets to hold onto; they are the things that never seem to reach the light of day. After all Jeremy had Christine. She was seemingly perfect. Enthusiastic, bright. Radiant even. Perfect for Jeremy. He deserved perfect, he deserved everything that Michael could never give him. 

He had nothing to offer other than himself. Jeremy didn't deserve damaged goods, broken and cracked around the edge until all he had left was a fragment of who he once was, sewn onto his sleeve like one of the patches on his hoodie. 

The progression was almost quiet, Jeremy cancelling game nights to hang out with his girlfriend. Snapchat stories filled with blushing faces and cheek kisses with the dog filter, Jeremy's laughter, once a beacon of happiness and nostalgia beginning to make the void in his chest grow as such a sound wasn't produced for him anymore. Nothing Jeremy did was for him anymore. 

Their first fight as best friends was over a girl. (Shouldn't you have known, Michael? It was always going to come to this.) They were ten, and Jeremy had picked Annie Hubble to be his reading partner instead of him, claiming that she was pretty and he wanted to talk to her. He told Michael to find another partner. He'd read alone that day, and the next three after that, until Annie had wiped a booger on Jeremy's shoulder and he came crawling back to read Charlotte's Web with him.

Senior year brings on a year of new lows for him, provided by a summer of missed texts and cancelled plans, a game case discarded by an empty bottle of mountain dew red. They pass one another in the halls, Jeremy with his arm around a brightly smiling girl with soft raven locks and a borrowed blue cardigan threatening to drown her. 

Michael enters a familiar bathroom, into the only stall that seems to have a working lock. He's pinned against the wall and a boy who he wishes was taller, and had soft brown locks instead of blond with a red streak. They makeout in the antiseptic scent of the bathroom, and Rich's lips don't feel the same, they're too dry and narrow, demanding against his own. 

He lets Rich fuck him, shrouded in the darkness of his basement, the blueish glow of a controller providing the only kind of light. It's awkward and heavy, he doesn't know what to do with his body, they don't fit together. He thinks that no one but Jeremy has ever made him believe he were the piece of a jigsaw, slanting until they found the right fit to create the bigger picture. Jeremy had found that in Christine. She is his bigger picture. Michael is discarded, defective to a fault. He’s brought back to reality by being shoved into the lumpiness of his beanbag, feeling the shift of the styrofoam beads with every roll of the other teen’s hips. Neither of them cum, and Rich eyes a full bottle of red that he'd been saving for Jeremy. He hands it over without a word, and shows him out. No one mentions it again, but sometimes he swears that he feels Rich's eyes on him as he walks through the halls with his headphones covering his ears in a desperate attempt to block all kinds of noise, both internal and external, away. 

Michael tunes Jeremy's voice out now, the once exciting chitter just a reminder of the friendship that didn't seem to exist anymore. He catches it once, on the very edge of an ended song that had caused his headphones to be lowered. 

“I'm sure Michael's fine! Just doing his own thing, y'know?” Jeremy was speaking to Rich and Jake, a smile on his face. Was this what he was doing? His own thing? Not voluntarily, rest assured. He didn't say anything, tired eyes lowering to the ground as he raised his headphones once again, tuned into the melody and out of his former best friend pretending to know him anymore. 

 

All major senior year milestones happened without him, the last homecoming was spent getting high alone in his basement, a cloud of haze filling the air of what should have felt like a nice autumn night. Senior skip day was also spent getting high, ignoring Snapchat stories of the beach, sand and sun and freedom from the confines of hard plastic chairs and mystery meat. Prom was, you guessed it, getting high in his basement. Alone with his cherry slushies that were mostly numb to him now, just a familiar sensation in an ongoing episode split between feeling like he was drowning and not feeling anything at all. 

He dreams about the bathroom the night before graduation, can feel the sudden uncomfortable heat from above as he heard frightened screams of girls and guys alike, doors slamming, stampeding down the stairs, Rich yelling his head off about Mountain Dew. He dreams that he goes through with it, goes upstairs and into the smoldering part of the building, letting the heat lick at his skin until he couldn't feel anything anymore. He wakes up strangely serene, as if the thought of walking into fire isn't the scariest thing in the world. (It isn't. The scariest thing in the world has already happened. He is alone.) 

Jeremy pats him on the back once after they receive their diplomas in the blinding light of the football field. He finds the sensation similar to one of his dream, stepping into fire, the simple touch alighting something deep in his core. He forces it down. He returns the congratulations and walks away to his mothers, wanting nothing more than what he was finally able to do. Leave and never come back. Jeremy's delighted laugh catches his ear just as he steps off the field, and he feels lost. 

College is an experience he doesn't expect. He brings guys with blue eyes and brown hair back to his dorm and he fucks them against his ridiculously flat pillows and kicks them out afterwards, feigning the need to be productive. He gets high with his roommate, though he's not that interesting and they spend most of the time in awkward silence that can only be broken by the fuzz of a high. 

He drops out after his first semester. The constant gruel of the tests and the homework and deadlines is enough to make his head spin. He just needs a break. 

Michael gets a job at an old record store a half hour away from home, spends most of the day recommending albums to old folks, and teenagers with denim jackets and vintage tees, tells them the significance of Bowie, Marley, and Zepplin. It's alright for a while. The pay is enough to get him a small apartment in town, closer to work. 

He gets an envelope in the mail one day, four years after graduation. It is expensive looking, calligraphy swirling along the stationary. He opens it, and in neat cursive, the envelope seals his fate. Not that it hadn't been already, licked and pressed like the adhesive of his pencil kind of envelope, misshapen and messy, the opposite of this one. 

‘Mr. Jeremy Heere and Ms. Christine Canigula invite you to witness the ceremony of their love and joy.’

He doesn't know what possesses him to send back the RSVP envelope with a checkmark in the 'yes’ option. ( Seriously, who even does invitations like this anymore?) 

The ceremony is beautiful for what it is, the condemning forever of a once Rock solid bond between two best friends. It'd crumbled long ago, but this was an effort to keep it down, wipe the foundation clean and start anew with different kinds of memories, ones that do not include him. 

Jeremy kisses his bride with that brilliant smile of his, one that's always looked too big for his face but felt like it fit there anyways through a pair of rose colored lenses. Michael finds himself standing, and passing faces he'd only briefly seen in the last few years without a second glance. 

He leaves, this time with the intent to never come back. 

Player two who?

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is welcome! Yell at me on Tumblr @ alec-gideons


End file.
